Sunday, November 14, 2010

In 2008, we warned about the dangers of putting a man in the White House with no executive, military, diplomatic, or private-sector experience. It should shock no one to find that American leadership has utterly vanished on the international stage when we elect someone incapable of providing that leadership. The lesson from both the Right and Left coasts’ media is that Barack Obama is in way over his head and doesn’t have a clue how to get back to the surface.

Friday, November 12, 2010

You can see the images they have in mind, section by section, by clicking here and then following the links under the heading “Proposed Graphic Health Warnings for Cigarette Packages and Advertisements.”

Among those rooting for Ms. Pelosi to stick around are Republicans, who are giddy at the prospect of reprising in 2012 the attacks they used in the past election cycle, tying Democratic incumbents around the country to the liberal from San Francisco.

Ms. Pelosi’s reply: Bring it on. “The reason they had to take me down is because I’ve been effective in fighting special interests in Washington, D.C.,” Ms. Pelosi said, citing the health insurance and financial services industries. “I’m effective. They had to take me out. I’m also the most significant attractor to support for the Democrats.”

Far from being a progressive conception, the socialist ethic is atavistic and represents the primitive morality of pre-industrial formations: the clan and the tribe. This is why its current incarnation takes the form of “identity politics,” the latest revolt against bourgeois individualism and freedom. Modern radicalism is the return of the repressed. Its values -- equality, cooperation, unity -- are the survival codes of small, vulnerable groups with knowable goals and shared interests. But the morality of tribal communities is self-defeating and disastrous when applied to complex economies, dependent on factors of production that are geographically dispersed and on trade exchanges that are trans-national in scope. In the context of a modern extended economic order, where goals are not shared, where market prices encapsulate knowledge beyond the capacity of a central authority and in situations so complex that no planner can rationally allocate economic tasks, the socialist agenda and its tribal ethos produce social atavisms -- the paternalistic politics, fratricidal nationalisms and economic despotisms, universally characteristic of socialist states.